


20/20

by StrangerInAStrangePlace



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Implied Jack/Ianto
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-07-29 05:48:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7672477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrangerInAStrangePlace/pseuds/StrangerInAStrangePlace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First impressions of Ianto Jones, from one Doctor Owen Harper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	20/20

There’s a pterodactyl hovering over Owen’s desk when he arrives for work in the morning (late, again, but if Harkness won’t bring it up than neither will he). He pauses in removing his coat long enough to frown up at newest addition to Torchwood’s collection of Shit That Shouldn’t Exist, and jumps back slightly when it swoops down just a little too low. Tosh grabs her monitor in alarm, but it’s already climbing back into the rafters, where it settles itself on a bit of pipe. Owen looks over at Suzie, already situated in the corner of the Hub she’s designated as hers, but she doesn’t spare a glance for him or the dinosaur.

“That’s new,” Owen says by way of greeting, and Tosh shrugs.

“It was here when we came in this morning,” is all the explanation she gives and Owen squints up at the ceiling.

“Who does it belong to, then?”

“Jack, presumably.”

“Right.”

The pterodactyl is staring down at him in a disconcerting manner, and Owen’s trying really hard not to imagine himself as an appetizer.

“I hope that thing’s a vegetarian,” he says eventually.

“She’s got a taste for sirloin, actually,” Jack replies as he comes out of his office. “And chocolate.”

“Are you serious?” Tosh asks, and Jack winks at her.

“Dark chocolate, specifically.”

Tosh’s eyes light up as she watches it glide through the Hub, and Owen resists the urge to knock his head against the desk. It figures that Tosh would look at a dinosaur - a dinosaur, for fuck’s sake - and see the coolest pet ever.

“So you’ve acquired a dinosaur,” Owen says. “I’m sure it’ll make a lovely mascot. But where the hell did it come from?”

“Right here in Cardiff. I caught her last night, with the help of a local guy.”

“Bet you had to Retcon the hell out of him after,” Suzie pipes up, finally looking up from her project.

“Even better,” Jack says as he leans on the railing. “I offered him a job.”

Everyone goes quiet for a moment, just long enough to let Jack’s announcement settle in. Somewhere above them, the pterodactyl lets out a screech.

“I’m sorry?” Suzie finally breaks the silence.

“Why?” Owen adds.

“Why not?” Jack counters.

“Not exactly a reason, Harkness.”

“Well, he did know how to capture a pterodactyl.”

“How bloody hard can that be?”

“Oh yeah, how many have you caught?”

“We don’t exactly have a dinosaur surplus on our hands, or haven’t you noticed?”

“Despite evidence to the contrary.” Jack looks pointedly at the dinosaur nestled in amongst the pipes and Owen rolls his eyes.

“ _Boys_ ,” Suzie cuts in.

“Anyway,” Jack abruptly cuts the argument short. “He starts on Monday, so everyone look sharp.”

“Who is he, then?” Tosh asks, attempting to diffuse some of the tension.

“Ianto Jones, 25, from Cardiff originally-“

“Hide your sheep,” Owen mutters, and Suzie tosses a paper clip at him.

“-went off to London, then changed his mind and came back.” Jack rattles off the facts like he’s already got Ianto Jones committed to memory. “He works in research-”

“We don’t need anyone for that,” Suzie points out.

“-has some skill in taking down a weevil -”

“Well, even Tosh can take down a weevil,” Owen jokes.

“Hey!” Tosh protests.

“-and he knows how to wear a suit.”

“That’s all we need,” Owen groans. He sees Tosh shoot him a conspiratorial smile out of the corner of his eye. He chooses to ignore it, the same way he ignores her vaguely hurt expression as she turns back to her work.

“Also, he used to work for Torchwood One.”

That gets their attention. Tosh’s head whips up from her monitor, and Suzie’s staring at him with an inscrutable expression. Owen can feel a headache building behind his eyes, which is completely unfair because he hadn’t even woken up with a hangover this morning.

“Torchwood One, as in Torchwood London,” Suzie says slowly.

“Yes.”

“The one that was destroyed.”

“That’s the one.”

“Weren’t there only a couple dozen survivors?”

“Twenty-seven, actually,” Jack clarifies. “And Ianto Jones is one of them.”

“Out of how many?” Tosh asks, her voice hushed.

“823.”

“Shit,” Owen mutters. Of course, he’s heard the numbers, everyone has, but it’s still staggering.

“Jack,” Suzie starts, rising from her workbench, “are you sure this is the right decision? I mean, we all have our duties, we have our projects, and we’re managing just fine. I’m not sure we need someone new coming in and messing up the status quo.”

“It’s already done, Suzie.”

“Where are we going to put him?”

“Archives, tourist office, kitchen, maybe I’ll just give him a mop and a broom.”

“We don’t need a bloody janitor, Jack!” Suzie nearly yells, and now she’s getting agitated and that’s exactly what Owen doesn’t feel like dealing with today.

“It’s my call, and I made it.” Jack’s tone is final and just like that the discussion is over. Owen can feel his fingers curling into his palm. Jack stands there watching them for a minute longer while the tension wraps itself around the room, and then he snatches up his coat and takes off towards the tourist office. Suzie shakes her head and stalks back to her corner.

“The last thing we need is some wanker from London skulking around down here while we’re trying to work,” she snaps, slamming tools onto her table with more force than is strictly necessary. Tosh opens her mouth to say something, changes her mind, and turns back to her keyboards. Owen feels his headache worsening and entertains the thought of killing them both.

\-----

When Ianto Jones arrives, he is young, handsome, and impeccably dressed in a tailored suit. Owen decides that he hates him immediately.

Jack gives him a tour of the Hub and a list of his duties - archives, cleaning, coffee, occasionally minding the tourist shop upstairs. He’s a glorified butler, but if he takes issue with the position he doesn’t show it. He stands there awkwardly while Jack makes the introductions and then wastes no time before heading straight into the archives. He’s said maybe a dozen words since he’s arrived.

“Weird bloke,” Suzie comments, but Owen’s not looking for a conversation so he pretends he didn’t hear her.

“I don’t get it,” she continues. “Why, after everything that happened in London, would you want a job here? I would think Torchwood is the last place he’d want to be right now, wouldn’t you?”

She has a point, Owen has to admit. The Torchwood Institute won’t be winning any awards for the way the survivors of Canary Wharf were handled, after all. There ought to be a lot of bitterness, and a lot of resentment, buried in Ianto Jones beneath all those layers of bland, and these things have a habit of manifesting themselves in very, very bad ways, especially in this line of work.

“For that matter,” Suzie adds, and Owen realizes she’s still speaking, “why does Jack think it’s a good idea to have him here at all? For all we know, with everything he’s seen, he could be seriously unstable. What if he‘s dangerous?” It’s as if she’s reading his mind, a little bit, and Owen frowns, vaguely disturbed by the thought.

“Maybe we owe it to him,” Tosh suggests, not looking up from her project.

“We owe him shit,” Owen snaps. “They made their beds, they’re the ones who should lay in them.”

“Most of them are,” Tosh murmurs, and in his stomach Owen feels a twist of anger that he can’t quite explain.

\-----

“Do you remember him?” Owen asks Suzie a few days later. He’s stretched out on his back while she’s curled on her side, facing the opposite wall.

“Remember who?” Suzie’s voice is already drowsy.

“The teaboy.” Ianto Jones. “From that week we spent in London going through the wreckage.” From that week they spent scrambling over heaps of rubble, salvaging what they could from the twisted metal and scorched concrete. Like vultures on carrion.

Suzie turns slightly and looks at him over one bare shoulder, frowning.

“No,” she says at last. “No, I don’t recall him at all.”

“He must have been there at some point.” Owen rubs at his forehead. They had showed up on the site the day after the battle, and survivors were already being pulled from the wreckage - not by them, of course, that wasn’t their job. Their job was to collect as much alien technology as they could, snatching up artifacts before they could “fall into the wrong hands.” They let other people, more qualified people, deal with the moans, the cries, the fading pleas for help. Better to pretend they didn’t hear - made it easier to focus on the task at hand.

“I’m sure he was there,” Suzie agrees, turning away from him again. “I just don’t remember seeing him. We were a little busy at the time, remember?” Far too busy to get a close look at the small group of survivors, dusty gray with ash and soot, huddled on broken sidewalks like neglected dolls that had been pulled down from the attic. Far too busy to ask their names, to meet their eyes, to consider the horrors they must have seen. Nobody escaped the Daleks or the Cybermen, but London was where everything started. The buildings may still stand, but the destruction was all around them, and nobody suffered more than those men and women who went down with Torchwood One.

Except, of course, for the ones who didn’t.

Owen closes his eyes and shakes his head once, as though he can banish the unwanted images. His mind is fucked-up enough as it is without adding survivor’s guilt into the mix. It’s easier to bury it as far back as it will go, just like it’s easier to hate young men with haunted eyes and pinstripe suits.

\-----

“He’s hiding something.”

“Like what?” Owen doesn’t care, not really (Suzie’s always been paranoid), but he indulges the conversation for lack of anything better to do.

“Don’t know,” Suzie admits. She’s perched on a corner of Owen’s work station, fiddling with a pen. “But he is. He’s strange. Always so quiet, so reserved, with that same blank smile. It’s like he’s wearing a mask. I mean, have any of us even seen his real face?”

“Paranoid,” Owen mutters, and he think he hears Tosh huff in agreement.

“I’m serious. He stays down in the archives for hours, and he doesn’t say two words to any of us when he’s up here.”

“He speaks to me just fine,” Tosh interrupts. “And anyway, it could be post-traumatic stress, couldn’t it? He was at Canary Wharf, after all. Maybe he hasn’t had time to deal with it properly.”

“No, that’s not it,” Suzie insists, but distantly, as though she’s speaking to herself. “It’s like he’s trying to make himself invisible.”

“Let him,” Owen replies, tipping his chair back and swinging his feet into Suzie’s lap. He smirks at her when she knocks them back to the ground with a roll of her eyes.

“Jack trusts him,” Tosh points out.

“Jack wants to fuck him,” Owen shoots back. Tosh frowns but doesn‘t reply.

The three of them go quiet as the object of their discussion walks into the room, oblivious to their conversation. He’s balancing a tray of mugs and he deposits them at their workstations with a murmured greeting, his expression polite but distant. Tosh is the only one who thanks him, and he gives her a small smile in return. For a moment, Owen thinks that Suzie must be right, because that’s the first real expression he’s seen on Ianto’s face.

“He’s hiding something,” Suzie repeats once Ianto has disappeared into Jack’s office. Owen rolls his eyes and snatches the pen out of her hands.

“He’s not hiding anything,” he mutters, nudging her off his desk with his knees. “He’s way too boring to actually be dangerous.”

“That’s my point,” Suzie replies, but Owen’s already checked out of the conversation. He thinks briefly of Ianto’s first day, and Suzie’s “What if he’s dangerous?” floats through his head. Owen grimaces and pulls his keyboard close to him. This is what Torchwood does, he thinks. It makes your afraid of your own shadow.

\-----

Later, much later, while he’s helping Tosh take apart the conversion unit, while Jack and Gwen stash two new bodies in the morgue, while Ianto Jones is sent home without a bullet in his head, Owen will think about Suzie and her suspicions and her paranoia, and he’ll laugh.

“What could possibly be funny right now?” Tosh demands with a glare and a voice like granite.

“Nothing,” he replies. “Really, it’s nothing."


End file.
